Distant Relations

by Carlos Fuentes

  “Forgive me.” He spoke in a mellifluous voice. “You were pointed out to me yesterday at the opening meeting. As we have the same name, I wanted to meet you.”

  I must have stared at him with an extremely stupid expression, because he was forced to add: “Heredia. My name, too, is Heredia. The same name, you see?”

  Though I said I did see, I had eyes only for Lucie. She looked magnificent, an ethereal, bewitched figure more beautiful than ever, her skin warmed by the tropics, her diaphanous gown swirling; and absentmindedly, out of simple courtesy, I asked this Heredia where his family was from; ours had come to New Spain in the sixteenth century. I anticipated his response.

  “Ah, no. Our Heredias will be much more recent arrivals in the New World.” Looking at him really for the first time, I saw that, despite my first impression, he could not be called old. “My mother,” he said, “fleeing the Negro rebellion, came from Haiti to La Guaira. Very recent in comparison to your genealogy, of course.”

  I tried to recall a “Negro rebellion” in Haiti seventy to ninety years ago, but my memory told me nothing. The other Heredia clasped his hands pontifically, as if he had guessed what I was thinking. “Ah, so your memory does not respond?”

  “No, frankly, it does not, Señor Heredia.”

  “But, nevertheless, isn’t it true we have no memory but what we recall?”

  “That seems rather obvious,” I replied with some annoyance. My conversation with this Heredia was becoming grotesque. In fact, I thought I detected a trace of senility in the man’s words and actions, and I tried to move away. He caught me by the arm. Extremely irritated now, I tried to free myself, but not before he forced me to listen: “If you ever need me, look me up in the directory.”

  “And why would I need you?” My rejoinder was brusque.

  “We all need to remember at times,” he replied affably. “I am a specialist in memories.”

  “Of course. Now, excuse me.”

  “But if you don’t know my name, how can you call me?”

  “Your name is Heredia, you have already told me.”

  “Victor,” he said in the softest of voices. “Victor Heredia. Imagine: the Haitian uprising took place, I believe, in 1791, but that was the time of Toussaint L’Ouverture; the rebellion of Henri Christophe came later. I’m not entirely sure of that: in fact, I’m not completely sure of anything.”

  The door between our room and that of the boys was half-open when Lucie and I returned to the hotel. The boys were watching television, but only slightly lower than the sound of a song interspersed with jokes, we could hear clearly Antonio’s voice, more serious every day, more indicative of his imminent adulthood.

  “No, Victor. I’m backing down on our deal. I choose to die with Mother.”

  “C’est pas chic de ta part,” said Victor, using one of the expressions he had picked up in his years of study at the French Lycée. As Lucie had taught the boys a very literary French, she was always surprised and pleased when she heard such phrases in her house.

  “What difference does it make to you?” asked Toño. “You want Father and me to die together so you and Mother will be left to cry all you want.”

  “It isn’t the same thing,” said Victor. “I tell you it isn’t the same. You traitor.”

  We could hear Victor punching Antonio, and I rushed in to separate them.

  Lucie locked herself in the bathroom. I reprimanded the boys and told them that if they didn’t behave themselves they would be on the first plane back to Mexico the next morning. My wife would not open the bathroom door, and when finally she came to our room, the boys had fallen asleep and she was no longer crying. I asked whether she had heard them speak like this before, and she said she had. And it was not just chance, she added. She was convinced that Victor made a point of bringing up the subject any time he knew she could hear. With a resigned sigh, my beautiful wife folded the Empire ball gown into a cardboard box and told me to do the same with my military regalia. The mulatto woman from the agency that rented the costumes had told her she would come by early the next morning to pick them up, the Señora understood, such outfits were rented almost every day; Lucie could leave the boxes outside the door and she would pick them up.

  The four of us flew back together. That simple action, I believed, would put an end to the morbid, if playful, inclination of my sons. As the plane lifted off from Maiquetía, La Guaira was a time more than a place, a cliff-rimmed port patiently awaiting the return of ancient ships to furrow the strangely calm and luminous sea. I tried to distinguish hands, faces, handkerchiefs waving goodbye from the large old houses and the Fort of San Carlos on the hill. I saw only the buzzards, which are the true lookouts of all the ports of the Caribbean. I closed my eyes and the hum of the motors blended with the memory of the plaintive whistle of the toucan in the Venezuelan dusk.

  The accident occurred that Christmas, when Lucie and her favorite, Antonio, went to Paris to visit her family. The DC-10 plunged into the sea near the Azores. Their bodies were never recovered. No, there was no sign, no warning. Now that you and I know all the things we know, we might be tempted to believe that there was some connection between them and the death of my wife and son. That was not so, and this tragic event had its most grave consequences, as might be expected, in my home, and for reasons that would surprise no one: Victor’s sadness, a sadness that moved me and moved all those who knew us, a sadness that caused our small apartment on Río Garona to become even more desolate, but a sadness my son refused to share with me. Because I had overheard the boys, only I knew the reasons. Victor found himself without a companion in his mourning.

  You will understand, Branly, that as soon as I realized the truth, I determined to be a true companion in my son’s mourning. But how could I take the place of his mother, whom he had expected to weep with him over my death and Antonio’s? What did the boy expect of me? What could I offer him? I was not the first widowed father who had to answer such questions. I observed how Victor was changing, deeply affected not so much by his mother’s death as by the absence of his mother as a partner in grief to weep over me and his brother. This sorrow had a different name: cruelty.

  What was to be found in this soul that Victor and I shared, so to speak? I have already told you: scorn for men, respect for stones. I decided that because of the circumstances the boy could afford to miss a year of school. The important thing was for him never to be separated from me for a minute, for him to learn my lessons—the good and the bad, as his mother had called them—by accompanying me to the thrones of bygone honor and recovered identity represented in the great ruins of our Mexican past. With me, little by little, he would penetrate into the heart of Mexico: its villages, its churches, its world of dust and cheap alcohol, its cheating, its humiliated Indian, its cunning cacique who controls the stores, the brothels, the pawnshops.

  “This is what we Heredias came from. Look closely. This is our clay.”

  I instructed him, Branly, to admire authority based on grandeur and dignity, and I pointed out the consistent absence of those qualities; I instructed him to dream of an ideal nation governed by a true aristocracy that would discipline both the masses degraded by vice and exploitation and the vulgar and rapacious exploiters of our nation.

  I was not sure how Victor was changing, but I knew he was changing. That part of him about which I knew nothing was growing daily; I felt intuitively that there were things that only my son knew, only my son wanted. He wanted and knew things he was not telling anyone, and only I knew that. He had no true companion in his mourning, and my fear was that he would seek such a companion in danger; that is, in the unknown. That is the reason I kept him so close to me. I became aware of what you already know: the indefensible arrogance of Victor toward his inferiors, especially servants. I was not unduly concerned, in view of the fact that this is an attitude common among all well-to-do youths in the Iberian world; what did disturb me was that my younger son’s behavior was causing me to long for the spon
taneous camaraderie of my older son, Antonio.

  And so, inadvertently, I began to undermine my own edifice, to compare the moments of coldness, the cruelty, of Victor to the natural joy, the spirit of celebration and playfulness, that had characterized Antonio. Another thing was happening that neither of us realized. Victor was forming me as much as I was forming him: like him, along with him, I sought and lamented my missing companion in death, my comrade in mourning: Antonio.

  My perceptions of Victor’s character became increasingly clear. One spring we happened to be in Aguascalientes at the time of the fair of San Marcos. That is a world of taunts, wagers, machismo, and intensified chance, a perpetual all-or-nothing, Branly, a cyclone whose eye is centered in the cockfight. There, everything I have just mentioned reaches a peak of frenzy not unlike that of the most ancient forms of communal games, mysteries, and hazards. I arrived at the ring at the last moment; I heard the shout “Close the doors,” and bets flew thick and fast. The cocks were sprayed with mouthfuls of water and alcohol, released, and set in confrontation for the battle that everyone, even the roosters, knows is to the death. I scanned the eyes, hands, heads, of the crowd transformed by the hysteria of betting into a great undulating serpent. Only Victor, in the middle of an excited crowd, sat totally motionless. He didn’t lift an arm, a finger; his icy gaze never shifted from the center of the ring—which for this single reason, because one person was watching in this manner, ceased to be a ludic circle and was converted into an arena of execution. Do you remember the Hitchcock film in which all the spectators at a tennis match follow the play of the ball except one: the murderer? My son’s unflinching stare told me that for him the death of one or both of the cocks was a matter of total indifference, since from his viewpoint this was the fate to which they were destined. The two cocks had been trained to fight, and armed with razors on their spurs; they were the playthings of their masters, but also masters in their own combat, and, ultimately, it was better to die in the ring than in the poultry market.

  That all this should be translated into such absolute moral indifference made me believe that for Victor the cult of aristocratic authority was being converted into a cult of fatalism and blind power, and I asked myself what had been lacking in an education intended to illustrate the unity of time, a time that does not sacrifice the past, which, after all, had been my goal in my relationship with my sons. I soon found out, the first time we went together to Xochicalco—before I met you, Branly. I was working with the team of the Swedish anthropologist Laura Bergquist one afternoon in the area of the pelota court you see below us, when we all heard, from the heights of the citadel above, a terrifying cry that some thought thunder, the thunder that long in advance announces the July late-afternoon rains in the Valley of Morelos. I looked up and saw Victor standing at the edge of the precipice, right here, Branly, where you caught him with the handle of your cane, right here where I am standing now, imitating Victor’s actions for you. His bleeding hands were extended from his body, like this. I ran toward him. Fortunately, Bergquist and two workers followed; Victor fell, but he fell into our arms.

  We had cushioned his fall, but that night the boy was delirious. His hands were badly cut, and he kept repeating the words, “I forgot,” “I forgot.” When we returned to Mexico City, he told me what had happened. He had been half-playing, half-exploring around the site of the Toltec temple, when he discovered a chink in the talus at the pediment of the plumed serpents. One of those frogs that seem to hop through the dust, guiding us to hidden mountain rivers, slipped into the opening and Victor tried to catch it. But instead of the rough, palpitating body of the batrachian, he tells me, he touched a surface of incomparable smoothness, something, he said, that felt like hot glass. I can never forget the vivid and perfect image. He removed the object, and when he saw it (as he was telling me, he again became feverish), he gazed upon something indescribable, a unity so perfect, so seamless, like a potent, concave drop of gold, that it needed no added embellishment, carving, or detail. If I understand what Victor was telling me, human hands could add nothing to its perfection, though it was not the work of nature. It had been crafted, he knew, because on the crown shone a relief, surely a sign, that seemed born of the very essence of its substance.

  Now this is important, Branly. My son confessed that he felt an irresistible hatred for that perfect object that could owe nothing to him, or to any man. He picked up a sharp stone and struck at the object until he split it in two, divesting it forever of the beauty inherent in its wholeness. In the frenzy of his task, Victor cut his hands. He hurled half the object from him. Holding the other half in his hand, impelled by the force of his shame, he ran to the precipice; he threw even farther the second half, which, he said, was burning into the cuts on his hands. Only then did he cry out, and fall.

  I let Victor sleep in my bed that night, but I turned my back to him. I had failed. Victor had learned the uses of arbitrary power, but in the process he had forgotten the memory of the unity of time. This was never my intention, I know you believe me. On the contrary, I had wanted human authority to serve the memory of past civilizations, and the awareness of the present to serve everything that had preceded us.

  The reason I am telling you all this, Branly, is that I feel we Heredias owe you a debt. I could read the thoughts that passed through your eyes the night we met. I am sorry to have deceived you. I am not a universal man from the century of discoveries. I am only a slightly resentful Mexican Creole, like all the rest of my compatriots marked by mute rage against their inadequacies. Mine is a selective culture. What can save me from the capitis diminutio that is the curse of being a “Latin American”—which is to say a man who turns everything he touches into melodrama? Tragedy has been denied us; even our deepest sorrows come under the label of the circus of disaster. Listen to our songs, read our love letters, hear our orators.

  Several months went by in which communication with Victor was difficult, if not impossible. He resumed his studies at the French Lycée. I observed him closely, and kept repeating that ridiculously obvious phrase I had once heard. “We have no memory but what we recall.” It began to haunt me, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Does what we forget cease to exist, or is it we who are diminished when we forget something? Does what we have forgotten exist whether or not we remember it? These thoughts quite naturally were in my mind during my work at archaeological sites. The vast treasures of Mexican antiquity are no less real because for centuries we had ignored their existence. Perhaps the work of the archaeologist can be reduced to this: to restore, however imperfectly, a past.

  I thought about this when I visited the city of the gods, Teotihuacán, the first true city of the Western Hemisphere. Its great avenues and pyramids are like a diagram of the ancient relationship of all things with all things. I remember our meeting here on a different afternoon, in a different space destroyed because Victor was with me, and today I believe that the limitations of my lesson were related to the changes that were taking place in our lives because of Victor. For, Branly, if you want me to summarize the most profound lesson of Mexican antiquity, it is this: all things are related, nothing is isolated; all things are accompanied by the totality of their spatial, temporal, physical, oneiric, visible, and invisible attributes.

  “When a child is born,” I told Victor that intensely pale afternoon, “it is accompanied by all its signs; it belongs to a day, a physical object, a direction in space, a color, an instant in time, a sentiment, a temperature. But what is amazing is that these personal signs are related to all other signs, to their opposites, their complements, their prefigurations. Nothing exists in isolation.”

  “Give me an example,” Victor said, and I sought his eyes. I felt that our ability to play together was being reestablished, and I explained, as an example, that if your day was that of the eagle Cuautli, it would correspond to the signs of the lofty flight that watches over the earth like a sun, but that this grandeur would find its complement in the sacrifice th
at must accompany it, in the figure of the god Xipe Tótec, who gives his life for the coming harvest, and who in order to escape from himself sheds his skin like a snake: the grandeur of the eagle’s flight and the painful misery of our flayed lord.

  First—yes, how banal—we played dominoes; then cards; increasingly complicated games, as if challenging one another. I resurrected the disturbing game of faro from Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, with its secrets of enormous power, immense riches, but, also, infinite death. Victor responded with tarot cards. I compared the somnambulistic indifference I had witnessed at the cockfight of San Marcos with an enthusiasm of sorts displayed one afternoon when we went to see the bulls. I had explained that the olé! of the bullring comes from the ancient Arabic wallah, an invocation, an address to God. Victor did not shout it out that afternoon, watching the veronicas of El Niño de la Capea; he murmured it like a danger-fraught prayer that would save the matador’s life because only he was repeating it.

  We played games with photographs, Branly: Victor remembering his seatmates in grade school; I, mine. We cut up photographs to create unlikely pairings, entire families with faces transported through time and space. We bought old newsreels, projected them, each trying to incorporate himself (one always had to be the spectator) into the ambience of the film: automobile races, wars in Manchuria and Ethiopia, a dirigible disaster, the rallies of Perón’s followers in the Plaza de Mayo.